Labour Day once a time to air out smelly goalie gear ahead of fresh season

'Now that I've stopped playing, I do miss it,' writes Bob Bruton, including the dressing-room camaraderie, the bad jokes and sometimes even playing well It's that watershed weekend again, the one where everything begins to change again. That would be Labour Day weekend. When I was a kid, it was back to school after a summer of playing baseball and tennis with my neighbourhood friends. When I was a teenager, it was time to go back to high school, and that soap opera, after a summer of working night crew, stocking shelves, at the old (now gone) Dominion grocery store in the little northern Ontario town where I grew up. Then as a young adult it was back to university in London, Ont., taking that four-hour drive in my old Ford Cortina, the Blue Buffalo, so dubbed for its not-so-smooth suspension. When I was all grown up, with a family and career, Labour Day weekend was a time to get my kids ready to go back to school. To buy them new backpacks and running shoes and jackets, even though the ones they already had were perfectly fine, in my estimation. I don't remember my parents going overboard with back-to-school goodies when I was a kid. By the time I was in high school, though, I do remember being told I could afford to buy my own stuff. Suddenly my list got shorter. But Labour Day also meant, when I was older, getting ready for hockey. It meant switching from running to the stationary bike, checking my goalie equipment to make sure it was still good, hanging it up on the backyard fence to get just some of that funky smell out and looking closely at my stick to see if it could last another winter. Of course, since I didn't actually stop that many pucks, my equipment would last many years. And my friends at Golds Shoe Service in Barrie could (and can, presumably) fix anything to do with leather, padding, straps, etc. I used to play in Elmvale, on Saturday nights, just pickup hockey. For a goalie, that meant about 50 shots in 50 minutes, some of them rockets, some of them knuckleballs, very little defence, different teams every week and a final score of about 15-12. I was usually on the 15 end, but nobody cared too much. I showed up every week, and as long as each net had a goalie — or "target," as they used to call it — that was fine. Not that I didn't get ribbed for my lack of comparison to Jacques Plante, but it was all in good fun. But I always tried my best because I knew I could not play hockey, even this mild version, forever, that one day the fates would conspire to create conditions that would keep me off the ice for good. Whether that was the lingering effects of the pandemic, injuries or just Father Time really isn't the point. Now that I've stopped playing, I do miss it. The camaraderie with the boys (women sometimes played, too), the bad jokes, the joy of actually playing well, once in a while. But not the pain that lasted into the following Tuesday, sometimes Wednesday. Hockey joins the impending end of summer, and the start of school, as reasons why Labour Day weekend matters. My hockey equipment still hangs on hooks in the furnace room downstairs. Bob Bruton covers city hall for BarrieToday.